Monthly Archives: May 2013

Hey everyone. I have some bad news about tomorrow’s News of the Week update: there won’t be one. I’m away from my computer all weekend and I haven’t had time to compile all the news in advance this week. Everything else looks to be fine.

Next Tuesday I’ll write about boss battles and when they’re appropriate in games. That will be published at the new normal time, 5:30 p.m.

Hope everyone has a great weekend and I look forward to sharing my thoughts on boss battles next week.

Here is fair warning: this is a tale of “back in my day.” Back in my day, when you walked to your local EB Games to pre-order a popular game, ensuring you could get it the day it came out, you could walk away with some cool swag. This was before teenagers ruined the word “swag,” of course. Sometimes it was a a small gift, like a keychain with the game’s logo or a pack of stickers. Sometimes it was something a lot better, like the game’s strategy guide.

This week’s top stories include Microsoft’s new console, a movie based on an unlikely game, and the weirdest and most expensive special edition of a game yet. All that and more in the News of the Week.

Question of the Week: which console are you more excited for and why, the PlayStation 4 or the Xbox One? Comment below or Tweet me your answers.

Music used in this presentation is “Ending: Roll Call/Duty Bound/Price Paid” by Martin O’Donnell and Michael Salvatori from the Halo 3 soundtrack.

Microsoft has finally done it: the company has blown the lid off the next Xbox, called the Xbox One. The event, held on Microsoft’s Redmond campus inside the now-famous @XboxRevealTent, took place at 1 p.m. today. This event showed off what the system is all about: being the ONE device (see what they did there?) in your living room. It can play games, television shows, movies, music. It can connect you with friends, family, and other Xbox Live users. It can help you get ladies*. But what Microsoft wants you to know is it can replace all your other devices.

*Not guaranteed.

The hour-long event was meant to highlight all the amazing aspects of the upcoming system. Other aspects weren’t so hot. Based on the information Microsoft gave everyone who attended or watched the event, here are the top three things I love about the console. Oh, and there are also three other things I’m not too stoked for.

I’m trying a new format. Instead of just me talking over generic homemade background music, I at least have some pictures using Soundslides. As always, comment below or Tweet me feedback or answers to the question of the week.

Things are about to get real in one week. So real, in fact, that it will make The Real Housewives of [insert city here] look partially staged and slightly exaggerated. That’s how real things are about to get.

But now it’s time for this article to get real. So, without further ado (and much less ado than last week’s article), here are the top five games I want for the new Xbox.